Canada’s National Post has started a column called ‘CBC Watch’. This inaugural edition critiques the Neil Macdonald segment that we ran a communique on earlier this week. In it, Macdonald lent a prominent voice to a Israeli-conspiracy nut by the name of Eugene Bird:
Mr. Bird’s implication — that Israeli agents are secretly controlling American intelligence gathering operations in Iraq — is fantasy, of course. But as Mr. MacDonald has shown in the past, he is receptive to such theories. In 2002, recall, he speculated on-air about whether Hezbollah — recognized in Canada and other civilized nations as a terrorist group — was not a “national liberation movement” unfairly smeared by Israel’s supporters. And last summer, in a report from Washington, he opined that America’s Jews, religious Christians and neo-conservatives — Mr. Bush’s “natural constituency” — “detest” the peace process; as opposed to the U.S. Arab lobby, which, he told viewers, supports peace “unconditionally.”…
When Mr. MacDonald was posted in the Middle East, the CBC was rightly criticized for the anti-Israeli tone of his reporting. When he was transferred to Washington last year, it was expected he would no longer have an outlet for this overt bias. But Mr. MacDonald seems intent on smearing Israel wherever he is stationed. If CBC executives are interested in providing Canadians with balanced news, they should seriously consider whether this is a reporter they want on their staff.
